Archive for November 2006

In a few years’ time, when the Health Nazis of the world have finally succeeded in banning Tobacco, Alcohol, Hamburgers and Gambling, you could be excused to thinking that they would be satisfied with that and give it a rest for a while.

“Everything is a poison, including water, if you have too much,” he said. “Caffeine is a stimulant that releases your internal catecholamines” — compounds that can serve as hormones — “that make you anxious, jittery and create the fight-or-flight response. When the heart beats too fast, bad things happen.”

The researchers found the situation is exacerbated because caffeine is heavily touted as a legal alternative to illegal drugs.

Energy drinks and dietary supplements are promoted mainly through advertisements and on certain drug Web sites that recount users’ experiences.

Everything is a poison. Health Nazis will never be satisfied until you eat nothing but celery sticks, drink nothing except breast milk, and accept self-flagellation as the only legitimate form of entertainment.

2 weeks ago I was arrested for standing around on a street corner, waiting for my friends. I was convicted for refusing to obey a move-on notice and fined $405.

This video from Korgy of the Melbourne G20 protest shows anarchists attacking a police vehicle. The police didn’t even attempt to ask them to move on, let alone arrest them. In fact they are apparently hiding behind the truck, doing nothing.

So either the police think the anarchists’ political views excuse them for violently breaking the law, or they are simply too frightened to arrest someone who has violent intentions towards them.

Reviewme.com is a new site that matches bloggers with advertisers. The basic gist of the idea is that advertisers will pay you to write a review of their product or service on your own blog.

The amount paid is calculated as a function of your Technorati and Alexa rankings, as well as the estimated number of subscribers to your RSS feed. As an example, this blog received a “2 star” rating and for this review I am being paid US$30. Reviewme.com will either send the money to a Paypal account or send you a cheque.

One of the biggest advantages of this idea is that – for me at least – this will provide some sort of relief for bloggers’ block. Whenever I can’t think of anything to write about or am lacking motivation, reviewme.com can tell me what to write about and motivate me with cold, hard cash.

The signup process is ridiculously simple, all you have to do is provide your name, email address and the URL of your blog and RSS feed. Your blog’s “star rating” will be calculated from the URL you give. You can also nominate multiple blogs if you have more than one.

If you don’t already have a Paypal account, then the signup process may extend to around 10 minutes instead of the 2 minutes it took me. As soon as that is complete you can get started on your first review, which is a review of the reviewme.com site itself (which is exactly what you are reading now).

The only doubts I have about this service is whether or not I will actually be offered any further reviews after the original review of reviewme.com. Are advertisers really going to be willing to pay $50-$100 for a 200-word advertisement on a blog that, for all they know, is only read by penniless hobos at internet cafes?

Nevertheless, everyone who signs up is offered to chance to review reviewme.com itself, so at the very least you’re going to get enough for a carton of piss out of it. That’s not so bad for 10 minutes’ work.

As an extra bonus, you can now tell your parents and friends that you have a real job. What’s not to like?

Over the life of this blog I have written a lot of posts about the pitiful state of the nightlife scene in Perth. Unfortunately, due to my server migration, most of those posts are still languishing in my archives on my hard drive waiting to be uploaded, so they aren’t readable at the moment.

In any case anyone who lives here knows that it’s shit and getting worse every day. The July 1 smoking ban killed off a couple more of the last remaining good pubs in Perth, and going there now is like going to a funeral.

I guess in part my idiocy last weekend was a subconcious resignation that it’s over. I knew the night was over after being ejected from the Elephant, there simply isn’t anywhere else worth going (and many would say the Elephant’s not that hot either, but we can agree to disagree).

Then, on the Friday just gone, three of my friends (including my flatmate) went down to our local boozer, the Stamford Arms. I stayed home. A huge melee broke out not long after they arrived, 2 of my friends were king hit and my flatmate was stabbed in the back with a broken bottle. All three turned up to cricket the next day very sore and sorry for themselves. My flatmate spent 4 hours in casualty, but is ok after a few stiches. His clothes are soaked in blood.

The police closed the pub at 11:30pm.

This is the last straw for me. Our own local, once a fairly reasonable drinking hole, has become a wasteland, filled with angry bogans and devoid of women. The 2 other pubs on the Scarborough foreshore have been closed for months, with no notice as to when (if ever) they will reopen.

Northbridge is a war zone, and even on the off chance you do manage to avoid being beaten or robbed, then you can just end up like me and be ejected for no reason by bouncers and police who are understandably paranoid about the entire situation. It is entirely fucked.

For this reason I have decided that my punishment wasn’t severe enough. I am imposing a curfew on myself for the next month. I will not be in any pub in Perth after the hour of 9pm. In fact I will probably not be going to any pub at all except for the Nookemburra, who are our cricket club sponsors.

I will be doing all my drinking at the cricket club or in private residences until my 30th birthday, which is on the 23rd of December.

At that point I will reassess, but I really can’t see any reason why I would want to go out in Perth again this summer. It’s just a fucking shithole.